


turn me inside out and upside down

by orphan_account



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-28
Updated: 2012-05-28
Packaged: 2017-11-06 04:58:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/414940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint thought he was street smart, until he met Natasha, and she taught him just how wrong he was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	turn me inside out and upside down

**Author's Note:**

> These things keep happening. This one probably can't be blamed on Harri though.  
> I suppose this could be in the same sort of 'verse as 'come on courage, teach me to be shy'  
> Title from How We Operate by Gomez (Thanks, Rosemary!)  
> More notes at the bottom.

When he thinks about it, Tasha taught him everything he knows outside the bow, or the sniper rifle.

.&.

She taught him to fight, knives, hand to hand, a million different martial arts mixed with dirty street fighting, because no one ever plays fair in real life, old fashioned wooden staffs longer than she’s tall.

She taught him how to cook, Greek moussaka with tiny sweet potatoes, delicate sushi with ginger and soy sauce and flat slivers of salmon and tuna, honeyed rice, spicy Cajun dishes that make his lips tingle.

She taught him how to drink too, how to swallow down vodka and swallow the coughing burn with it, that the best way to drink JD is with just a splash of coke and no ice, because ice melts, she told him with a quirk of lips that he’s deciphered means she’s laughing at him, the man ten years older than her but so ignorant about life outside the circus.

She taught him to smoke, too, he remembers. He’s been smoking on and off since he was fourteen and sneaking smokes from his foster father was his own small act of rebellion, but she taught him to make a cigarette last as long as possible, how to twist his wrist and flick ash from the end without dusting his clothes with it, even how to blow smoke rings one night in Taiwan, when she’d followed him silently to the roof and they’d sat next to each other, wordless as they passed the only battered cylinder in the bottom of the pack back and forth, but even in the dark, he’s pretty sure she was smiling.

She taught him how to disappear, how to melt into crowds, that he’s handsome, but with work, he becomes unremarkable, blank, and no one looks twice at him. How to destroy records, wipe CCTV. She’s almost as good with technology as Stark, but no one knows. She feigns indifference whenever he starts technobabbling to Banner, but Clint knows, and it makes him smile. How to hide, vanish into spaces not much bigger than the average cardboard box, how to manage his claustrophobia until it’s just a buzzing behind his ear, like where he focused pain in the circus, forcing it to an unimportant corner of his brain and letting himself forget about it until he gets through this. Whatever this happens to be. How to slide into whatever skin he needs to to get the job done, like slipping into his SHIELD gear, easy as breathing. She taught him how to dress, how to look like he belongs with expensive suits and more expensive watches, with flannel and torn jeans and boots, with a leather jacket and wraparound sunglasses, if that’s what the job calls for. She even teaches him how to tie a tie, because he’s thirty five years old and never learnt how to tie one. Never came up in the circus, amazingly, and Coulson knows his unique temperament too well to allow him into meeting with the higher ups, occasions that require something other than the black combats and t-shirts of his SHIELD uniform, or the smooth and worn Kevlar of Hawkeye’s world.

She taught him how to fix himself, how to fix other people, surface wounds at least. How to clean cuts and scrapes, setting broken bones, relocating shoulders and thumbs and knees. How to stitch gashes closed so the bright white bone doesn’t shine through. She shows him how to work through pain, how to hide his injuries, how to swing a punch without betraying his frailty, without betraying that he’s broken. Not beaten though. She taught him that the only time he’s beaten is when he’s stopped fighting, and she taught him not to stop fighting until he’s dead.

She taught him how to kill. He knew the theory, sure, but she showed him what it was like to watch the light drain out of someone’s eyes, how to feel the pulse slow in a man’s neck and wrist, how to feel the flutter of a panicked heartbeat judder to a halt. How to keep a chokehold just long enough to feel the fight leave his victim, until he’s dead weight, limp and heavy. She taught him to kill someone with a knife without spilling any blood, how to strangle someone without leaving a bruise, how to kill someone from a half-mile away and not blink, just sit up and slowly, methodically, clean down his rifle, pack it up and walk away. How to kill someone without betraying any of the emotions, and eventually, how to kill someone without feeling anything. How to match her shot for shot as they sit side by side in whatever dive bar she took him to after the kill, how to think about something, nothing, anything, as long as he doesn’t dwell on the blood on his hands, the red in his ledger she calls it, accent still holding just the barest hint of her native Russian. She taught him to go home the night after a kill and drink tea, green or chai or camomile, because tea makes the nightmares lessen, covers them in a mist, like he’s watching through a smudged window instead of the one pulling a trigger from hundreds of feet away, pulling a knife out of someone’s gut and leaving him to bleed, pulling a bowstring taut and feeling the cool metal of the arrow shaft on the corner of his lip, just above the scar she gave him the first time they met, really met, not when one or both was circling unconsciousness or death. She taught him how to sleep again, to lie on his back and breathe in and out until the cold sweat has evaporated, leaving his skin tight, and he can drift back off, only to be woken again a few hours later, dreams dripping crimson screams.

She taught him how to fuck. Not that he didn’t know already, there were dozens of women before Natasha, more than a few men, and some he even slept with more than once, but then Budapest happened, and they slowly began turning circles around each other, falling out of buildings or planes or jobs and into bed, where he’d run calloused fingers over her scars and her breath would catch in her throat. He’d coax noises out of her, and she out of him, and it would be a constant battle for dominance, not that he would ever expect it otherwise.

He’s pretty sure she even taught him how to live. When SHIELD found him, he was for all intents and purposes dead. Could feel his pulse in his neck sluggish, like fighting something made of treacle, could feel the icy cool in the tips of his fingers. His vision was shot, blurring in and out and greying at the edges, and then there was a voice there, soft, feminine, unfamiliar, but clearly used to being listened to. She spoke in a mixture of Russian and English, but he got the gist. She was essentially telling him that if he died now, he’d be a coward, and didn’t he want to live and see the bastard that stabbed him suffer for it? He could hear his handler, an Agent Coulson that he hadn’t met before this mission behind her, making disapproving noises about vengeance, and how he could sense the amount of paperwork he was going to have to do whether Clint lived or died. She told him to breathe, and he could feel something settling on his gut, realising much later, after he’d been stitched up and was recovering in medbay with a heroic amount of morphine running through him, that it had been her, literally holding his vital organs into his body. He hadn’t seen her for months after, hadn’t even known her name, just Codename: Black Widow. He was new enough that most SHIELD agents didn’t know his real name, just called him Hawkeye, or Hawk, with varying degrees of insult and snark. She’d called him Hawkeye, he remembers, even though she’d known his name, of course she had. There was very little Natasha Romanova didn’t know about something that interested her.

.&.

When he thinks about it, _really_ thinks about it, he’s not sure he’d even _be_ Hawkeye without her, not the Hawkeye people know now, the Hawkeye people see on the news with the rest of the Avengers. He’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be alive today without her, either, even if he had survived bleeding out in a back alley of Dubai.

**Author's Note:**

> I was thinking about expanding this into a Five Things Natasha Taught Clint (And One He Taught Her) but I dunno which five things from this I would choose. Thoughts, opinions, preferences either way?


End file.
